Business Process Management (BPM) is growing business practice that includes aspects of management and Information Technology (IT) in order to improve a business' efficiencies. BPM utilizes various principles, methods and techniques from the management and IT fields to develop, implement, manage and evaluate operational business processes involving various sources of information, including individuals, groups, organizations, applications, documents, and other information. These operational business processes encompasses numerous repetitive business processes that are utilized by these entities in the course of day-to-day or routine operations. These BPM projects are preformed in an effort to improve operational efficiencies, i.e., making business processes that are more accurate, faster and less expensive, as well as providing decision-makers with reliable data upon which decisions may be made.
While BPM projects seek to improve operational efficiencies within organizations, developing the projects has been a decidedly inefficient task. A recent Gardner Report shows that 40% of the time devoted to BPM projects is spent on process discovery or the collection of information needed to perform the BPM project. Currently, process discovery is performed primarily through a series of interviews with different role players in the business process. Manual and semi-automated analysis of process data is also performed. However, the difficult and time-consuming part of this process is capturing the user's view of the different business processes including tools used, time spent, dependencies on other users, etc. These variables form a large part of the “as is” or current view of the business process.
Notwithstanding the usefulness of the above-described methods, a need still exists for a robust and dynamic electronic chronicling method and system that allows for real-time streamlining and optimization of business processes based on users, tools, and activities.